My main use case for this is: I get some random data file thrown at me. Could be json, csv, xlsx anything that has data that can somehow be interpreted somewhat tabular and I want to find out quickly what's going on.
You can really go from not knowing what's in a file to a decent understanding in less than a minute.
Here's a quick example from today of why I find it such a general purpose tool
Pipe in some fixed-width formatted data
kubectl get pods | vd -f fixed -
Gives me a searchable, usable output. Press right to highlight the status column, shift-f and I get a count (+histogram) of the statuses. Three have failed. Hit enter on that row and I can see specifically which ones have failed. This takes a few seconds (I just tried and did it under 5 from running the above command).
If I knew I wanted the failed ones I could have grepped or similar but I can then order by most restarts, etc.
This is a tiny part of the functionality but it's an example of "there's some tabular-ish data but what's there?". Load X, histogram, filter, sort is probably 90% of my use-cases.
You can really go from not knowing what's in a file to a decent understanding in less than a minute.